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This article suggests that in the investigation of World Englishes, which has tended to focus on syntactic, phonological and lexical preferences, the analysis of shifts in word meanings (and meaning–form relations in lexical items) needs to be incorporated. Exemplary small-scale studies show that in polysemic words certain varieties come to prefer specific meanings, and in word fields some varieties begin to prefer certain forms over others. Based on analyses of different ICE corpora, a set of prospective verbs, their meaning relationships and their varying correlations with syntactic construction choices in different varieties are investigated quantitatively (using HCFA and conditional inference trees) and qualitatively (showcasing interesting innovative, possibly emerging uses in some countries). Regionality is consistently shown to be a weakly conditioning significant factor. Thus, it is suggested that lexicosemantic variability and diffusion in the evolution of World Englishes deserve and need to be investigated systematically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In January 2021, Singapore's national performing arts center 'Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay', known especially for the high-quality acoustics of its concert hall, ran a special program called 'All Things New', featuring concerts and other art performances. It was advertised on location (see Figure 1), by a leaflet (Figure 2), and in a one-minute video (https://www.esplanade.com/festivals-and-series/all-things-new/2021) also shared on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U-7Yw9sTPs), and introduced young artists and bands who performed on the institution's 'Concourse' and its open stage called 'Outdoor Theatre' (for an example, see Figure 3). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Englishes, distinct forms of English which have emerged in postcolonial settings and countries around the globe, are typically regarded individually, as unique varieties shaped by idiosyncratic historical conditions and contact settings and no coherent theory to account for these processes is developed so far. It is argued that despite dissimilarities, a uniform development process, shaped by consistent sociolinguistic and language-contact conditions, has operated in the individual instances of rerooting the English language in another territory.

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ABSTRACT One of the most striking findings when comparing the ecologies of world Englishes is the amount of language mixing and the number of truly mixed (hybrid) varieties involving Englishes. The formula X [language name] + English has produced blends in many different countries, like Taglish, Singlish, Hinglish, Chinglish, Japlish, Denglisch, Finglish, etc. Others include 'mix-mix' in Hong Kong, Sheng in Kenya, or Camfranglais in Cameroon, or lack a commonly accepted designation (in Malaysia, Pakistan, South Africa, and so on). This article offers a systematic but exploratory survey of varieties, linguistic practices and contexts which tend to be viewed in isolation but show similarities in some of their properties and sociolinguistic settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world is shrinking – globalization has been one of the main forces transforming today's life patterns. One of its manifestations, one that has proliferated substantially to what was customary just a few decades ago, is global travel, in various forms and for various purposes – and one of the most important ones of these purposes is tourism. The opportunity and the infrastructure to travel to interesting places pretty much anywhere fairly easily and at affordable prices has been bringing people to all corners of the world. Admittedly, the word ‘affordable’ in this sentence refers predominantly to people from developed, industrialized, wealthy countries, so socially this is a skewed and selective process. But the fact as such remains, and it has important ramifications for and adds new facets to the forms and functions of global English. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the impact of Brexit on usage of English as a working language in the European Union and discusses the sociolinguistic factors associated with the same. It mentions the role and status of English language as lingua franca, in the education system. It also discusses factors such as communicative accommodation, standard language ideologies and globalization.

The ongoing expansion and diversification of English, especially in the Expanding Circle, calls for a comparative analysis of these processes and a deepened theoretical understanding of this dynamism. A key question asked in this paper is whether or to what extent the 'Dynamic Model' of the evolution of Postcolonial Englishes is able to explain these processes and can be applied to Extending Circle countries as well. A decade after its first influential publication, reactions to the model are surveyed systematically, including some new applications, modifications, approaches at testing it, and some criticism. Applying the comparative-descriptive framework of this model and some of its constituent components, the progress of English is outlined in China, Korea, and (less broadly) Japan, the ASEAN, Thailand, Namibia, and Rwanda. Furthermore, it is argued that a similar dynamism is driving the widespread emergence of hybrid mixes between local languages and English and phenomena of 'poststructuralist diffusion,' English being adopted by whatever means, in fragments and unconstrained of norm concerns, driven by strongly utilitarian considerations. A tabular summary assessment compares these processes with constituents of the Dynamic Model and finds that despite some similarities it is not well suited to grasp the vibrant developments of the Expanding Circle. Instead, the notion of 'transnational attraction' is defined and proposed as an appropriate conceptual framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the authors' insights on the editorship of "English World-Wide" (EWW) journal. One of the author recalls his 16 years of managing the journal as editor and the changes in the field of English language. Other authors mention their worrisome exhilaration as the editorship of the journal will be pass over to them, their commitment, and the challenges and responsibilities they will encounter.

It is well known that native speakers of English around the globe are by far outnumbered today by speakers of English as a second or as a foreign language (Crystal, 2008). English is thus regularly used as a lingua franca, i.e. an intermediary language used between speakers of various linguistic backgrounds, for transnational and intercultural communication in many domains of life (such as business, diplomacy, higher education, tourism, etc.). The study of conditions of using ‘English as a Lingua Franca’ (ELF), intrinsically connected to the fields of World Englishes and Second Language Acquisition (Schneider, 2012), has come to be a booming sub-field and topic of research in English linguistics over the past few years, as is indicated by the publication of a few textbooks, the establishment of a conference series, and the launch of a scholarly journal (JELF). The focus of these approaches has been on the functions, usage conditions, and practical applications of ELF (Seidlhofer, 2011), and also, though to a lesser extent, on any characteristic structural properties (Dewey, 2007; Jenkins, Cogo & Dewey, 2011; Cogo & Dewey, 2012). Clearly, ELF can be found in a wide range of possible applications and contexts, as Cogo & Dewey (2012: 31) have stated: ‘As a natural phenomenon of sociolinguistic variation, ELF includes all types of communicative events, from the transactional to the interactional, and various possible settings, such as the institutional and the casual.’ It is considered to be independent of the interactants' native-speaker status: prototypically ELF involves communication between non-native speakers of English, but sometimes native speakers participate in such encounters as well. It centrally involves accommodation, negotiation and adjustment of forms to achieve successful communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes editorial activities in the selection and handling of contributions to English World-Wide, covering the five-year period of 2007 to 2012. Continuing earlier descriptions along these lines, it summarizes editiorial procedures from submission to publication. Furthermore, it categorizes submissions by the world regions and topics which they cover, and thus attempts to uncover trends of ongoing developments in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a report from the editorial office of English World-Wide, covering the five-year period of 2003 to 2007. Specifically, it describes the stages of the editing and manuscript handling process from submission to publication, and it breaks down submission and publication figures of articles by world regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces BLUR, an electronic corpus of Blues lyrics from the early twentieth century, as a valuable resource for the study of syntactic phenomena in Earlier African American English and investigates the properties and origins of a peculiar construction found in it. The design of the BLUR corpus is presented, and methodological consequences resulting from the nature of the texts are discussed. Subsequently, a few noteworthy syntactic structures documented in it are briefly illustrated. The most challenging of these, a sequence of inchoative verbs (notably begin, start, or commence), the particle to, and a verbal -ing form, as in begin to falling, is then analyzed in some detail, considering syntactic constraints and historical documentation in potentially related varieties, represented by electronic corpora and other sources from Late Middle English to present-day dialects. Based on these findings, a hypothesis on the likely origins and diffusion of this construction is developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This papers investigates the representation of the variability characteristics of the post-creole continuum of Jamaica in literature, and it discusses theoretical ramifications concerning the nature of an author's 'pan-lectal' competence. Based upon Thelwell's novel The Harder They Come and set against the background of theoretical statements on literary dialect, the origin of the novel, and the Jamaican culture which it represents, the variability of literary dialect is investigated by two complementary types of approaches: a quantitative sociolinguistic analysis of three phonological and 13 morphological variables of Jamaican Creole as represented in the speech of 14 fictive characters, and a qualitative documentation of the style-shifting employed by some of these characters. The results show that Thelwell's literary representation of the Jamaican speech continuum is remarkably accurate and in line with the findings of fieldwork-based sociolinguistic studies. A wide range of variation between basilect and acrolect is convincingly represented in the novel, with the characters' idiolects correlating with their socioeconomic status and with situational parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines particle or “multi-word” verbs in five ICE corpora: East Africa, Great Britain, India, the Philippines and Singapore. It begins with the hypothesis that particle verbs can develop variety-specific properties in several areas, including incidence and frequency of use, structural behavior, and productivity range. Systematic differences were found between the varieties under investigation. In particular, Singapore English was found to exhibit not only the highest frequency of particle verbs, but also the widest range of types in its structural uses and its formal and semantic creativity. In the case of certain particle verbs, it was found that certain forms and meanings predominate in specific countries, although the limited size of the datasets, and the consequent low frequencies of individual particle verbs, makes generalization difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]